THE GALLERY RESTAURANT Time and led the singing of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during a sev- enth-inning stretch at Wrigley Field. He's played in a rock band with fellow writers Stephen King and Dave Barry. "I am sure many Illinois residents were startled to see someone whose name they might know as a story- teller chosen to help deliberate about what is probably the gravest real-life problem in the law," he writes. But the Harvard-educated Turow has continued to work as a lawyer, even as his writing has flourished, and he believes he's not unique in his wrestling with the issue of capital punishment. In fact, he thinks a nationwide assessment of the death penalty is under way, one that will eventually lead to abolition. Just 10 years ago, this was unthink- able. Support for capital punishment was overwhelming among politicians and the public. "It was a closed issue," he said. Reconsideration Cracks in the armor came from the innocent. The past decade has seen 58 death-row inmates exonerated nation- wide, including nine so far in 2003. Even people who support capital punishment recoil at the thought of a system so vulnerable to error it could make a deadly mistake, Turow said, and that's the main reason some polls show declining support for the death penalty "Americans are idealistic about jus- tice," he said. "They want it to func- tion symbolically, to reaffirm their belief in the law's ability to make this chaotic thing we call life more order- ly. They have no appetite for execut- ing innocent people." In Illinois, then-Gov. George Ryan had no appetite for it, either. After 13 people on that state's death row were cleared, he halted all executions and set up the special commission that included Turow. At the time of his appointment, Turow already had personal experi- ence with two mishandled death cases. In one, he helped free a man wrongly convicted. In the other, he helped win a reduced sentence after bringing forward information about the killer's awful upbringing in a . crack house. But even he wasn't ready for what he saw once the commission began its work, especially the frequency of certain problems in capital-punish- ment cases: coerced confessions, manufactured evidence, mistaken identifications. "It really was surprising to me to see how often a terrible crime pushes well-meaning people in directions they wouldn't ordinarily go," he said. Or maybe not so surprising. The kinds of cases that draw the death penalty — the "worst of the worst," horrific murders that shock and outrage the community — are fraught with emotion, Turow said. And therefore peril. "There is a natural inclination to want to restore order," he said. "There is a desire among authorities to comfort the community, and to some extent to comfort themselves. And what you can get is a rush to judgment." Not always, of course. But often enough, the author said. Yet even with his growing doubts about the system's ability to separate the guilty from the innocent, Turow said he looked hard for reasons to support the death penalty. He examined some of the argu- ments in favor: • The death penalty is a deterrent to crime. (If that were true, he won- dered, why do some states with exe- cutions have higher murder rates than neighboring states without?) • The death penalty is cheaper than imprisoning a killer for life. (It isn't, he concluded, because of the costs associated with the various automatic appeals.) • The death penalty is the ultimate punishment for the ultimate evil. (But who decides? Turow found no consis- tency or logic in its application.) • The death penalty means that killers don't wind up better off than their victims. (Turow: 'Allowing sur- vivors to rule the death penalty process makes no more sense than it would to allow only the families of the dead in the World Trade Center attack to determine what will be rebuilt on the site.") Even after knocking down these arguments, Turow admitted he is still attracted to the idea of execution for the perpetrators of "crimes of unimaginable dimension" and for convicted murderers who murder again while behind bars. The idea is one thing, though, and the reality is another. "In the end, you have to accept the limits of what any human process can accomplish," he said. To expect the system to determine ultimate evil and who committed it is just asking too much, in my opinion." 17 u _m Enjoy gracious dining amid a beautiful atmosphere of casual elegance 41 BREAKFAST • LUNCH • DINNER OPEN 7 DAYS: MON. 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